Zoom Coffee Hour
Right after Sunday's service, gather on Zoom for for conversation and connection in a virtual coffee hour. The link is provided after each service and it is also sent to those who receive the church's Friday eBulletin.

BUC Spotlight

In BUC's May newsletter, Contact, Reverend David provides a fine description of what Unitarian Universalism is. Shared here is only the ending paragraph, written with clear vision and hope.
"This promise is for us. For everyone. Everyone. It meets you where you are and says come, take my hand, journey with me. Together. In our church building or in our living rooms, in times of hope and times of uncertainty, when things are easy and when things are hard and when we’re apart, we’re still together, none of us alone, companioned.
In hope,
Rev. David"
Click on the link to the left to read his column in its entirety.

Time: Friday, Mar 27, 2020 at 7:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
BUC member, Maria Moser is hosting our second BUC VIRTUAL open mic night from 7:00-9:00 pm. You can watch and listen, or share a song or talent with us! Use the link below to join us.

Reverend David's message begins with, "Let’s map the color line in this nation, right now." The statistics will take your breath away and tug at your moral compass because we already know the dangers of complacency. David then closes with, "If you are a person committed to justice in the world, join the chorus of voices, each different, each working in their own way, and together make plain that the way things are isn’t the way things should be: face reality when the world is in denial.
In hope,
Rev. David"
If you click on CONTACT to the left, you can read Rev. David's powerful message in full.

Below is Rev David Schwartz's column in the January issue of Contact, our church newsletter. It is, to say the least, worth repeating.
From the Minister
"Hope happens exactly in the middle of difficulty.
A 36-year old geography teacher named Scott Warren joined with others in the activist group No More Deaths—a ministry of the Unitarian Universalist church in Tucson—to provide food and water to those crossing this country’s Southwest border.
In the summer of 2017, during an intense heatwave, the government we elected directed our Border Patrol to set up surveillance of Warren. We caught him in the act of providing food, water, and clothing to two migrants who had walked from Central America. Having caught him, the government we elected charged Mr. Warren with three felonies. We prosecuted him for providing humanitarian life-saving aid to the stranger. For two years, we prosecuted him for being the good Samaritan.
Just over a month ago, in his second trial, the jury emphatically declared him not guilty. He went free. The work of No More Deaths continues.
F Scott Fitzgerald wrote “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
When we tell the nativity story on Christmas Eve, we rarely dwell on the very next event to happen in the Gospel from Matthew. In his telling, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus fled to Egypt within 24 hours of the birth, escaping a tyrannical king bent on genocide. It was, for them, hopeless, and yet they were determined that it should be otherwise, as it is for countless refugees today.
In a world that is volatile, complex, unpredictable, uncertain, in lives that are not guaranteed peace, or tranquility, or even the promise of real justice, we a people who believe in hope exactly in the midst of difficulty. We light a chalice each week in the service in part because we are called to be light-bearers to one another.
The poet Jan Richardson writes:
Blessed are you
who bear the light
in unbearable times,
who testify
to its endurance
amid the unendurable,
who bear witness
to its persistence
when everything seems
in shadow
and grief.
Blessed are you
in whom
the light lives,
in whom
the brightness blazes—
your heart
a chapel,
an altar where
in the deepest night
can be seen
the fire that
shines forth in you
in unaccountable faith
in stubborn hope
in love that illumines
every broken thing
it finds.
In hope,
Rev. David"

Buddhist Meditation

Reverend Marcia Curtis is temporarily canceling the Sunday evening meditation until further notice. For more information please clickredlotussangha.org. We hope to resume the meditation and dharma talks in the next few weeks.